When the self spotted its illusion

 As long as there is a “you” doing or not-doing anything, thinking or not-thinking, meditating or not-meditating, “you” are no nearer home than the day “you” were born.

 

However many years “you” may have been at it, and whatever “you” have understood or have not-understood, “you” have not yet started if there is a “you” that is still in the saddle.

 

As long as “you” do anything as from a “you”, “you” are in bondage.

 

Wei Wu Wei (The Tenth Man)

 

You have probably come across the acronym e-g-o, edging God out. That’s the idea that there is an inner interference that doesn’t allow us to be connected with That—the Force that most of us had glimpses of, but that we can’t really put in words. So what to do to get from here to there?

 

Nothing! If you take Wei Wu Wei’s perspective at face value, the “you” cannot reflect on, change, transform, because the “you” is illusionary as an actor, witness, prayer, changer. So what can we do? Maybe we can sit in silence for a moment and have a look at the conundrum.

 

Do “you” remember the day something mystical opened up in “you”? Let me ask “you”, was there anything “you” did to bring about that transformation or did it happen spontaneously, out of “your” conscious awareness. That was “my” experience. Something happened through “me”.

 

That’s perhaps something we can do—stop striving and start looking. Oneness is us. We don’t have to do anything to own it or connect with it. No shaming or changing the e-g-o, just seeing the self as it is. Like a rainbow in the sky—an optical illusion that never existed in the first place.

 

The spiritual seeker is the problem statement, as is the spiritual teacher who wants “you” to zoom into the e-g-o problem statement. Wei Wu Wei advises in “The Tenth Man” instead, “It’s only with total humility and in absolutely stillness of mind that we can know what we indeed are.